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Heirloom Beans

From Twilight’s Blog by Twilight Greenaway

February 8, 2009

Winter is a great time to rediscover beans. Yesterday I saw Vanessa Barrington give a talk about Heirloom Beans, the book she co-authored with bean purveyor Steve Sando at new our local food co-op.

Vanessa did a terrific job of convincing her audience that beans are easy, nourishing and surprisingly versatile. And, if you cook a pot for the week, she pointed out, you always have “food” in the fridge.

I’m already kind of a convert, and find that beans are one of those things you can soak/boil while you do other things (my favorite kind of “cooking”). One of the more useful facts: beans take longer to cook if they’ve been sitting on a shelf. In other words, if you buy them from a store (or farmers’ market vendor) where they turns over quickly, you’re less likely to end up having to boil them forever. Makes sense, but I still don’t think I would have come up with this on my own.

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Closing the aquaculture loop

From Twilight’s Blog by Twilight Greenaway

February 5, 2009

I enjoyed Tom Philpott’s observations from the Seafood Summit, which he describes as a “complex dance between the fish industry and the NGOs that monitor them.”

Like Philpott, I am very interested in the idea of integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA). Now taht many of us understand the dangers of monocropping on land, it’s time to start drawing people’s awareness to the ways that large-scale aquaculture “tend to require huge amounts of inputs and throw off massive amounts of waste.”

On the other hand, he points out: The best sustainable-minded farmers figure out ways to “close the loop” through on-farm biodiversity.”

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